I’ve always had an affinity for the scrappy outlier, the character that beats the odds to win the race, get the girl, save the world and find the antidote, all while keeping the school bus from careening over the cliff.

Well, of course, you might say, those are all positive outcomes. We’re all on the side of winning, love, world preservation, life and the safety of school children. But it’s more than that. I wouldn’t be nearly as excited or invested if the outcomes involved a previous Olympian, Brad Pitt, a renowned scientist or the Department of Transportation. Would you? The exciting element in a scrappy win is — er — the very scrappiness of it.

The same is true of brands. Scrappy brands are idea brands. They blow things up and start fresh. They are experiential and personal. They come from behind and take you by surprise. And when one of them succeeds ...? Well, it’s nothing short of extraordinary.

We may think we want brands to exceed our expectations, but scrappy idea brands know the true challenge is to make our expectations irrelevant in the face of their offering. They differentiate by becoming the alternative, the something — service, product, opportunity, medium — we didn’t know existed but now can’t live without. Think of your favorite painting in the world ... got it? It delights you not by exceeding your expectations, but by showing you something fresh and new that you hadn’t yet dreamed of. It’s risky. And it’s personal.

As Youngme Moon, Donald K. David professor at the Harvard Business School, said in her book Different, “This doesn’t mean these brands are ‘better’ or ‘worse’ ... they are differentiated ... not as the offspring of competition, but as escape from competition altogether.”

I can quickly think of a half-dozen brands and organizations that fit this profile — some of them on our own client roster. Easy to remember the ones that stand out, isn’t it? I’ll save you a gratuitous plug to simply say: These are the brands Premier Studios develops and seeks. Let’s all go make more of them.